New York Recap Written a Few Days Ago:
I just got back from a weekend in New York. On Friday we met Claire in The East Village for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. While the food was decent, the Vietnamese coffee was excellent.
We stayed at Claire's overnight, and the next day I met up in Brooklyn with Nunu from my summer program. We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, hung out in Chinatown, ate at a vegetarian restaurant, got bubble tea, walked to Midtown, and checked out Bryant Park. The vegetarian restaurant was good, but not any better than the ones at home.
After saying goodbye to Nunu, I walked back to The East Village, visited the Strand, which was impressive in its inventory size but ironically didn't have the book I was looking for (Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale in French), and hung out in Tompkins Park and watched skateboarders (all of whom except 1 were mediocre). From there I walked to Klong (Thai restaurant) to meet Eva, Claire, Hadar, and Sheldon.
Dinner at Klong was great--it was one of the best Thai restaurants I've ever been to. Afterward we took a cab to Hadar and Sheldon's place. It was nice to finally meet them.
On Sunday, Eva, Claire, and I visited Columbia, and ate at this cafe by campus for breakfast. Afterward we took the subway to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, which was awesome.
After The Gardens, I walked to Avenue J to try the famous Di Fara's pizza. The wait time for a slice was ridiculous (45 minutes), but the wait and the price notwithstanding, it completely blew my mind. It's easily in the category of Tacconelli's, i.e., pizzas seemingly handed down from the heavens.
After pizza I took the train back into Manhattan, walked around the Lower East Side, and got on the bus to come home.
The city itself impressed me greatly on this visit. First of all was the impression of vibrancy. Countless streets were packed, seemingly 24 hours a day. It felt like a continuous party everywhere.
Next was the incredible ethnic diversity. The melting pot moniker is aptly given to New York. It was like taking a bunch of shops, faces, and street carts from every nation on earth, shaking them together, and tossing them out in random, dense sprawl. The intensity and variety of social stimulation was wonderful.
From a planning and design perspective, I noticed a couple striking things on my trip. First, and given street will be much wider than any given street in Philadelphia, often with "malls" constructed down the center, consisting of trees, gravel paths, benches, and chess tables. The effect that these streets create is one of a grandiose place, and I like it.
Next, the buildings are taller on average than in most other places. I'm not talking about the skyscrapers, because they aren't necessarily taller than other cities' skyscrapers, and not more impressive either (the skyline is nice, but it doesn't blow me away). No I'm referring to the brick apartment buildings that line seemingly every street in the city. Their size is impressive, again creating a feeling of the grandiose and perhaps also the cosmopolitan.
Third, fire escapes are common everywhere, mainly on the aforementioned apartment buildings. In Philadelphia they almost always appear at the back of the buildings, leading into an alley. In New York they are on the front. This doesn't strike me as positive or negative, just different.
Fourth, the city seems to have far fewer trees on the sidewalks than other cities, like Philadelphia. This is a negative, in my opinion, but it didn't bother me as much as I would have expected it to. I should mention though, I was impressed by the multitude and quality of the small and medium sized parks throughout the city.
Fifth, certain parts of the city, like the Upper West Side, feature noticeable topographical variation, which I like. It wasn't San Francisco, but the sloping streets by the Hudson provided lovely visual variation to the cityscape.
One final comment--I don't see why people compare Brooklyn with Philadelphia. Maybe the similarities these comparisons reference are demographic or sociological--perhaps--but visually, they don't look similar to me. Boston and Philadelphia look visually similar to me, but not Brooklyn and Philadelphia.